Impaired Facial Emotion Recognition and Preserved Reactivity to Facial Expressions in People With Severe Dementia

Guaita, Antonio; Malnati, M.; Vaccaro, Roberta; Pezzati, Rita; Marcionetti, Jenny; Vitali, Silvia; Colombo, Mauro

doi:10.1016/j.archger.2009.09.023

Cited by 44 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…This could result in the film more straightforwardly inducing mood change, with no need for the viewer to understand the main narrative and the laughter inciting mimicry. There is evidence that mirroring of facial expressions is preserved even in very severe dementia [42]. Differential reactivity to the positive film could also be related to suppression of emotions; negative but not positive emotions are normally suppressed in social situations, such as in the testing session.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotional Reactivity to Film Material in Alzheimer’s Disease

Mograbi

Brown²,

Morris³

2012

Dement Geriatr Cogn Disord

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Aims: To explore emotional reactivity in mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease (AD) using film material, investigating the influence of dementia-related material and awareness of condition. Methods: Twenty-two patients with AD and 21 healthy older adults viewed films with positive, neutral or negative content, including a film about dementia. Reactivity was measured through a self-report questionnaire and filming of facial expressions. Awareness of condition was assessed contrasting patients’ versus informants’ versions of an anosognosia questionnaire. Results: The AD patients showed reduced self-reported reactivity to negative films, but exhibited a pattern of facial responses similar to controls for all films. Awareness was associated with frequency of negative facial expressions during the dementia film. Conclusions: AD patients may have impairments in self-reported reactivity to negative stimuli. Awareness may mediate responses to dementia-related material.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotional Reactivity to Film Material in Alzheimer’s Disease

Mograbi

Brown²,

Morris³

2012

Dement Geriatr Cogn Disord

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Section: Assessing Emotion Recognition Abilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, among negative emotions, some studies find diffuse impairment in the recognition of fear, anger, sadness, and disgust (Guaita et al, 2009; Lavenu et al, 1999; Rosen, Perry, et al, 2002) while others find selective preservation in recognition of one or more of these emotions (Keane et al, 2002; Kessels et al, 2007). The research is similarly mixed for recognition of surprise, with some findings of impairment (Guaita et al, 2009; Kessels et al, 2007) and some of no impairment (Keane et al, 2002; Lavenu et al, 1999; Lough et al, 2006). In terms of positive emotions, most studies have found that patients with bvFTD show no deficit in recognizing happiness (Fernandez-Duque & Black, 2005; Kessels et al, 2007; Lavenu et al, 1999; Lough et al, 2006), but again, there are exceptions (Guaita et al, 2009; Keane et al, 2002).…”

Section: Assessing Emotion Recognition Abilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion recognition in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer’s disease: A new film-based assessment.

Goodkind¹,

Sturm²,

Ascher³

et al. 2015

Emotion

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Deficits in recognizing others' emotions are reported in many psychiatric and neurological disorders, including autism, schizophrenia, behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Most previous emotion recognition studies have required participants to identify emotional expressions in photographs. This type of assessment differs from real-world emotion recognition in important ways: Images are static rather than dynamic, include only 1 modality of emotional information (i.e., visual information), and are presented absent a social context. Additionally, existing emotion recognition batteries typically include multiple negative emotions, but only 1 positive emotion (i.e., happiness) and no self-conscious emotions (e.g., embarrassment). We present initial results using a new task for assessing emotion recognition that was developed to address these limitations. In this task, respondents view a series of short film clips and are asked to identify the main characters' emotions. The task assesses multiple negative, positive, and self-conscious emotions based on information that is multimodal, dynamic, and socially embedded. We evaluate this approach in a sample of patients with bvFTD, AD, and normal controls. Results indicate that patients with bvFTD have emotion recognition deficits in all 3 categories of emotion compared to the other groups. These deficits were especially pronounced for negative and self-conscious emotions. Emotion recognition in this sample of patients with AD was indistinguishable from controls. These findings underscore the utility of this approach to assessing emotion recognition and suggest that previous findings that recognition of positive emotion was preserved in dementia patients may have resulted from the limited sampling of positive emotion in traditional tests.

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“…Based on the double dissociations that have been reported for visual imagery on the one hand and visual perception on the other hand at higher order levels of the visual processing stream like color and object categories (e.g., faces), in verbal material as well as in other modalities (Bartolomeo et al, 1998;Dulin et al, 2011;Guaita et al, 2009;Metcalf, Langdon, & Coltheart, 2010) we hypothesize intact imagery activation in higher order cortical regions (Mousikou, Coltheart, Finkbeiner, & Saunders, 2010). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%